Top two: Lesser Goldfinch
Bottom three: House Finch, who is yellow instead of red like most (I love him)
Posted Feb 12, 2019
Whoa. Your Texas LEGO males are wild-looking. I’ve had 30+ Lesser Goldfinches hanging off my two sock feeders lately, but none of them look like that.
Oh yes, we do get the black-backed flavor males here. I don’t know if I’ve seen the green-backed ones in Texas. My guide says most males from Colorado to Texas are black-backed, west of Colorado they’re green-backed. You do get some awkward-transition males during spring though:
Also HOT GOLDFINCH ACTION
The above photos were taken at the FABULOUS bird blind at Inks Lake State Park in Burnet County, TX (being in that blind was a religious experience). I left the blind and got to see two grey hairstreaks mating, then got onto a trail for a little bit, and a hummingbird saw me and immediately proceeded to I shit you notdo hardcore aerial maneuvers (like, he was painting the sky with a gigantic smiley face holy carp that hummer was either loving life or was seriously high on fermented sugar water). And he was flying AT me for part of his show, too.
I’m not sure if it was from reading this post, but this morning I looked out at the thistle sock outside the kitchen window and there was an almost-completely-black-backed male Lesser Goldfinch on it! It’s the first of those I remember seeing around here. He got away before I could snap a picture, but I’ll keep my eyes peeled and try to document him if he comes back so you can enjoy the sight of one black-backed male surrounded by umpteen green-backed ones. 😀
Allow me to add today’s new visitor to the yard:
PINE SISKIN!!!!!
The nearest pine is like, 20 miles away, but okay 😂 I keep joking about having great reviews on Finch Yelp
February 14, 2019
So, here’s the darkest male Lesser Goldfinch I’ve seen at my sock feeder in the last few days. Still some green on the back, but at least around here (SoCal) this counts as pretty dark:
the downy woodpecker is a small woodpecker found in north america – the smallest woodpecker species found on the continent. they are almost identical in plumage to the hairy woodpecker, but can be distinguished by their smaller size and smaller beak. downy woodpeckers mainly feed on insects removed from trees, but sometimes visit birdfeeders for treats like suet, mealworms and peanuts.
A Star Trek idea: A comedy sitcom where instead of a Vulcan on a mostly human ship it is a human on a mostly Vulcan ship
All the Vulcans are fiercely protective of the ‘fragile, illogical, prone-to-danger, smart, reckless little human’.
To make the human feel more accepted (as it is only logical) the Vulcans try to include aspects of terran culture in the ship’s day-to-day life, failing spectacularly at it.
The human loves them even more for it.
They’ll get better at celebrating the human’s birthday next year. It’s the thought that counts.
@jvlianbashir THAT’S A GOOD END TO THAT EPISODE THOUGH…
the vulcans put together awful, bland decorations. they make a cake because it’s of “significant importance”. they go through the process of putting together this party and Studying this Human Ritual and the entire episode is setting up to what you KNOW will be a horrible result. they do a bad job!!
then when the human’s birthday comes, and they reveal the off-the-mark, underwhelming looking birthday bash, the human just. starts crying. because they had no idea their crew would go through all this trouble to celebrate their birthday, and even put up DECORATIONS, or make a CAKE, and there’s a birthday card with extremely polite impersonal messages written and a hundred perfectly tidy signatures.
and the vulcans are just standing around like “you appear upset. the Birthday Party was unsatisfactory”.
Its always weird, feeling a hyperfixation take root.
Like I’ll be watching some movie and all of a sudden, some miswired synapse fires off and a bunch of neurons in the cerebellum go “MINE.”
And I’m like “no, guys, this is mediocre at best,” but it’s too late. They’ve adopted these characters and this universe and there’s no turning back.
I’m going to be thinking about it every hour, of every day, for somewhere between two weeks and five years.
In the span of eight seconds, I’ve gone from “not really paying attention” to “this is going to be part of my identity” and that’s definitely a weird shift to experience.
OH MAN there’s a yard feature!?!?! BACKYARD BIRDING FTW!
Yeah, there’s a concept of a “patch” that can include one or more locations, and then you can group the reporting output at the patch level. I haven’t used that much, but I’m sure for a certain type of birdwatching it would be awesome.
It’s amazingly good. I’ve been building database-backed websites since the beginning of those. It’s easy to disappoint me and hard to impress me, and I’m very impressed by eBird.
It works hard to meet you wherever you as a user happen to be. If you want to use it as an online list-keeping tool that keeps track of all your data and lets you slice and dice it different ways, but you want to pretend no one else on the site exists and not let them see your data, it does that. If you want to do that but also make your information public it does that too, with a very full set of features to hide or show as much or as little of your information to the public as you want.
If you want to know what birds have been seen at a particular place and when they’ve been seen there, it’s awesome. If you want to know where you might be able to see a particular species, it’s awesome. If you want to set a personal goal to see as many species as possible within a given geographic region, it’s awesome.
All of the above refers to the website. The eBird app is also awesome, but differently. It’s a fantastic tool for entering your data in the field. And it continues to improve in significant ways at a steady pace. The recent update that lets you edit a checklist in the app after submitting it is fantastic, for example.
In terms of identification apps, I have all of them, but my favorite is the Sibley app. (Unsurprising, since I’ve been a Sibley fan since his field guide first came out.) It’s not as good as having the book with you, but it’s a lot easier to carry (since I always have my phone with me). I probably refer to it once or twice on most outings, and also use it occasionally for playback (though I’m ethically opposed to using playback myself in most situations).
If I were starting out I’d definitely use Merlin. The latest version, as you say, is very impressive. (One of the things that makes it so impressive is that it uses the distribution and abundance data from eBird to rank the identifications it offers you, so I guess this is another reason to use eBird: because the data you contribute is helping all the Merlin users.) Merlin isn’t directly useful for me currently, because I’m birding in areas I know so well that I have that information in my head already. If I’m having an ID challenge it’s because I’m dealing with a rarity or a relatively fine-grained distinction, and Merlin isn’t as helpful for that. But if I were traveling somewhere else I would definitely use it.
Final reason for joining eBird: if you do that and choose to make a public profile I can see where you’ve been birdwatching and vicariously enjoy your outings. 🙂
I’ve mentioned (in tag screeds, so you might have missed it) that my level of birdy obsessiveness has crept down a notch since the end of 2018. I’m still birdwatching every day (eBird checklist streak at 429 days), but I’m not actively trying for the top spot in the eBird year rankings in the county. (Well. Not much.) (I’m currently in second at 189.) (But it’s not like I’m keeping track or anything.) (Mark’s ahead by 10 species.)
Anyway, I wanted to share some of the fun, and I thought instead of keeping track of the county year list (which obviously is ticking up relatively quickly in these early months) I could instead talk about my county life list.
The male Tufted Duck that I (barely) saw at Lauro Reservoir on January 6 was my first county life bird of 2019. The bird was hanging out with some Lesser Scaups, floating along with his head tucked in, which made it tricky to get a good view. But at one point his tuft stuck up a little and I was able to snap some very distant shots through a chain link fence:
So, not the most satisfying view, but the strong black-and-white pattern was enough to ID him even without the cowlick. And I had Curtis Marantz (one of the more intimidatingly awesome birders I’ve been lucky enough to see in action) standing next to me confirming, so there was no doubt.
The Tufted Duck was #329 in my Santa Barbara County life list, and he was a legitimate life bird overall for me, too, at least in eBird, and I think probably in reality. (I threw away my lists when I quit birding in my late teens, so I’m going by memory. But I’m pretty sure I never saw a Tufted Duck back then, and these days I just treat eBird, which I started using in 2004, as my canonical source.)
Fun fact: There are 18 Santa Barbara County birders who are listed on the county birders’ “400 Club” web page. There are only 6 eBird users with more than 400 species in the county in their eBird lists, and 3 of them haven’t bothered to include themselves in the 400 Club listings; a bunch of other birders who are in the 400 Club are also in eBird, but with fewer than 400 birds there. So there’s some messiness, with a lot of long-time birders having birds from older lists they haven’t bothered to import into eBird even if they’re using it, and other birders with big lists (whether or not they’re in eBird) that they haven’t bothered to send in to the people maintaining the 400 Club listing.
But it’s a game, and for game purposes I’m just going to look at eBird. I’m currently ranked #20 in the Santa Barbara County all-time rankings there, but Conor is only one bird behind me and likely to pass me at any time; he’s a great birder and quite active.
